Chapter Text
July sets a bounty on Vash. Not a large one, and they won't pay for his corpse, and he's committed no crimes (the city wants him for questioning, no further elaboration, which seems on the level), and the posters feature a written description of his appearance without an accompanying image.
It’s less of a bounty and more of a notice. Send him our way if you see him, please. The price on his head might as well not exist for all it affects him. He could ignore it. He should ignore it. He visits a general store in a town with a plant church and the shopkeeper forces money and ammunition on him. It's a gift. I don't know from who, but I'm guessing you do. And we were told to tell you: run from the things that hurt you, not the family who loves you.
On a related note, what an excellent time of year it is to go be nowhere near July.
He putters about in the vicinity of May City instead, keeping plants alive, taking deliveries, returning lost cats, making friends. So long as a traveler doesn't bring trouble with them, most people are happy to meet a stranger passing through, especially a helpful one with stories to share. Most people are kind when they feel safe to be.
He misses the weather forecast for a sandstorm, and a postal worker on the road lets him shelter himself and his bird in their van until the winds settle.
In a village that only exists because its residents haven’t the funds to buy vehicles to move with, someone has taken to feeding a pair of stray cats.
A family hires him to escort a parent and sick child to May City for treatment; when the kid barely old enough to dress themselves hears that Vash doesn’t live anywhere, they offer to let him share their bedroom forever.
An innkeeper tries to steal the packages he’s ferrying and smother him in his sleep. Vash checks the yard and finds bones under the sand.
You take the good with the bad.
He really wishes they wouldn’t do that sort of thing, though. He can’t be everywhere to stop all of them every single time, and watching the people he loves do their best to hurt each other never gets easier.
---
In May City, he goes shopping. Prices trend higher, but the same variety of markets doesn’t exist in settlements outside of the great cities, and he has several unrelated purchases to make.
A hardware store for his sputtering radio, first. He likes keeping his things functioning, so, by extension, he likes buying the materials to repair them with. Not much clears his head as well as restitching a loose thread on the turtleneck or fixing the hinges on his glasses so that they bend as well as they did when Brad got them for him. His radio is older than half of humanity at this point, and Vash will see it live forever even if he has to replace every piece of it.
With the best part of the shopping trip complete and that experience unspoilable, he deals with the worst part.
Vash passes his frankensteinian monstrosity of a firearm to the gunsmith and then keeps his hands at his sides and steadfastly does not move to take the gun back. He’s kept the revolver in easy reach every second of every day for decades, losing hold of it only for modifications and repairs he can't manage on his own. He doesn't like the thing, not really, not any more than someone might appreciate a good shovel or pickaxe, but in its absence it becomes a black hole.
The smith gawks at him when he tells them he wants more weight stapled onto what’s already, over the years, become a metal brick that happens to contain a space for bullet storage. They say, “That’s going to make it too heavy to aim.”
“Not for me,” Vash replies. “Someone… sent me ammo recently, as a present or something. I dunno. Can't tell what he thinks I'm gonna need it for, but I want to not resort to it if that's an option.”
“…So you're trying to make this gun unusable?”
“Into a club,” he corrects.
The gunsmith hefts it. “I’m pretty sure it already is.”
Nothing stops Vash from acquiring a real stick and leaving the handgun to fire its bullets in peace, but a single weapon on hand is all anyone should need, and one too many already. (Not that he uses it as a weapon. It works just as well as a shield and a tool for breaking or redirecting objects at range.)
The gunsmith plainly thinks he's an idiot, which he can't argue with, but they agree to the work, and to his request to make it a priority so he can collect it by afternoon tomorrow.
It’s a very fast job. Still: until he has the gun back, a part of him will never stop calculating the fastest route back to the gunsmith’s shop.
He can’t bring himself to lose track of any of the things he has on him. Every single item he owns is either a gift or necessary for his survival. He keeps redundancies of food and water and medicine, but he otherwise carries nothing he can afford to give up.
He’ll restock on consumable supplies next, and then dinner from somewhere…
…he slows to a stop across the street from a post office.
More specifically, across from the bulletin board outside of the building.
From this distance, he can’t read most of the text on the papers plastered across the corkboard, but he recognizes from the shape of the formatting the same innocuous notice July put out that sent him running hundreds of iles west.
Oh.
He won't need long to collect his gun and Billions and put distance between himself and May.
He's nearly taken a step in that direction when a little Nai-shaped voice he doesn’t usually listen to points out that, even by Vash's atrocious standards, this is an excessive and unsustainable response. If he immediately uproots himself at every shadow of a hint of a whiff of unwanted attention, then he might as well lock himself into his cell at Home and never show his face outside again. At least that way he’d get chances to rest.
July’s notice hasn't hurt him, and May’s shouldn’t, either. The reward money could buy a large pizza. A handful of acquaintances have brought it up in conversation, followed by recommendations that he get it over with, drop by a police station, and give whatever statement the law wants from him. Maybe, he’s replied each time, and afterwards they let him steer them towards other topics.
He’s overreacting. Two great cities isn't that many, really, out of seven. Not even half. Barely more than one. And, whatever they suspect he has involvement in, it can't be too bad with an enticement so small. (Whatever they suspect he has involvement in, it’s big enough that July convinced May to care.)
This could just be what it seems: a slightly pushy invitation.
(The plant cultist gave him ammunition.)
He… could find the police. To hear from them what they think they’re doing. Vash hasn’t committed a crime (except deliver contraband on occasion, but he doesn’t think they can prove that); they can’t hold him for long over a suspicion. Three days or so – he’d have to make arrangements for Billions first – and in return he would get a better idea of the larger picture.
He’d rather not, though.
He can’t afford the time, and that’s assuming it would only be three days.
He’ll stick to the original plan and leave tomorrow as soon as he has the gun back. It would be stupid to do otherwise, especially if the notice has reached surrounding towns so it wouldn’t make a difference where he is. He needs the revolver modified, for his peace of mind if for no other reason, and Billions could use a break after carrying passengers the past few days.
Barring unforeseen variables, he can manage a single night so long as he avoids crossing paths with a citizen who actually cares – which, while theoretically so easy as to be a non-issue, is still an entirely luck-based proposition, but what’s life without a little smidgen of risk?
(Happy and comfortable, that’s what. But he doesn’t really deserve as much.)
He actually has been left a way out as well, signposted and lit neon-bright: the wanted notice has his appearance written instead of illustrated. He can fold away the jacket, cover his left arm, switch to a pair of sunglasses, and invalidate the entire description. It’d be easy. It’d be safe.
He would rather get shot.
He won’t hide the coat Ship Three’s crew gave him or the arm Brad went to the effort of crafting for him as if he’s ashamed to be seen with them. He won’t. Besides, nothing exists that can replace them. If he packs them away, he doesn’t know what would remain of him. He’d still be a person, he’d still be fine and functional, but, with the traces of his history stripped from him, he might not be Vash anymore.
…It occurs to him, on a secluded bench with his mouth full of sandwich, that tying his entire identity to a jacket might seem a little maladaptive from an outside perspective.
When he removes the prosthetic for maintenance, he occasionally so vividly feels the empty space left behind that he needs to consciously remember that moving his left arm will not affect his surroundings. Phantom limb syndrome, obviously. The publicly available literature might be lacking on the biology of independent plants, but Vash refuses to believe he can have kinesthesia for a severed limb that got crushed into its component atoms and ejected from this dimension. Or whatever happened to it.
His arm doesn’t exist anymore – but, under perfectly ideal conditions, he would need a little under a month to return to the location where he last had it. A tomas and a sand steamer would get him there. In seven minutes, he can reach the gunsmith’s shop. In sixteen, he can reach the hostel he stabled Billions at. He sits forty days from Donut’s grave and forty-eight from the shop he sold her tack to, the same in a different direction from the last place he found Home (but that’s wrong because the ship moves), a month from the remains of Ship Five (also wrong, the sand sea has long since broken the carcass and spread the bones across the planet), and two and a half weeks from the third city of July.
He keeps nothing he can afford to lose.
He chews on his dinner. He considers.
Running is hard enough without constantly fashioning his own leashes for a pursuer to choke him with. That seems… worth addressing. Not changing, necessarily. But accounting for.
Well. If he dropped the sandwich, he wouldn’t take the loss personally. He at least has that much to fall back on.
He doesn’t imagine he would, at any rate.
He wouldn’t, would he?
Come on, his abandonment issues can’t run that deep.
He pulls a face, then slackens his grip. The sandwich falls to the ground with a whisper-quiet thump. Vash chews on his last bite and considers for a while longer.
Hm.
He leans down to fetch it, brushes the sand from the bread, and resumes eating. Anyway, he won’t replace his outfit.
What he will do is buy some totally unnecessary trinket, mass-produced with the blandest design known to man, easily replaceable even if the brand goes under because a half dozen copycats will exist at any point in time, and hold on to it without developing any emotional attachment at all.
It can’t be hard. He won’t let it be hard. He’s in one of the most populous cities in the world; a person can’t walk half a block without passing a shop that sells a dozen products like that. He’ll find something. He'll find anything.
(He visits a tavern, makes a group of incredibly drunk university friends who won’t remember him come morning, convinces them not to commit to a life choice that would attract the police, gets an ear pierced, and never grows to do more than tolerate the earring. Success?)
---
Vash loves humans unconditionally, which is why he hasn’t, say, established a financially and politically influential doomsday cult that casts him as the central figure of worship and all of humanity as sinners barely fit to even attempt to redeem themselves. (Parts of the Eye’s doctrine feel weirdly like a personal attack against him. Which is ridiculous – their God just adores very particular passages from the Bible, that’s all, that’s the reason, and also He doesn’t love them – the world doesn’t revolve around Vash, not even if he can claim partial fault for every trauma and inconvenience that has happened to a human or plant on this planet.)
Like, yes, he gets it, humanity falls into the same ruts and repeats the same mistakes if they don’t take active care to avoid doing so. Exhibit A: plants. A resource both necessary and finite, yet humans burn through them like candles, and a black market exists for the flesh of red plants and plants who don’t produce materials as immediately useful as water or electricity.
The latter is…
…Vash puts a stop to it. When he finds it.
Which has only ever been after the plant….
He doesn’t know how to end the exploitation. Historical examples of revolutions don’t provide analogues to dependent plants, who possess little in the way of physical agency. Plants can't advocate for themselves, and humans have a difficult time recognizing or empathizing with cruelty against organisms they don’t share a language with.
Not their fault, that, but it means independent plants can’t act openly, either. As soon as humans find out Vash belongs to a group they don’t consider sapient, he expects his words to become so much meaningless noise.
He understands how to help a person, plant or human, directly in front of him.
For the rest of it, he doesn’t have an answer.
He gets the rationale behind misanthropy. He really does. He's met a massively diverse range of humans over the years, and a handful of them have been genuinely horrid. If Vash wanted to, he could find no end of reasons to hate them for. But what has murder ever done besides make a problem worse?
Probably about as much as running has.